The Virginia Association for Biological Farming has organized this event, and Twin Oaks Community Garden will be tourable at 1pm, 3pm and 5pm on Saturday and Sunday (ONLY!). Tickets (per vehicle) are $25 in advance, $30 on the day, for as many farms as you care to tour.
BUY TICKETS
Download Farm Tour Guide
Read all about it: 2015 Richmond Virginia Area Farm Tour #RVAFarmTour
Shake the Hands that Feed You! October 3 & 4, 2015 1 PM to 6 PM
Spend the weekend of October 3 & 4 touring Richmond area organic farms!
Buy your ticket now. Load up your car with friends and family (one ticket covers everyone!) and head out for a day — or two — of meeting area biological farmers and seeing where and how your food is grown. Go at your own pace. This farm tour weekend is self-paced with farms located throughout the area.
Interested in volunteering? Help us support the local organic food movement in Richmond. Volunteer on one day of the tour and receive a free pass to take the tour on the other day of the tour with a carload of people. Please contact Sue Ellen Johnson at SueEllen@VABF.org.
More info on the tour and the farms
FARMS:
Amy’s Garden, Avery’s Branch Farms, Broadfork Farm, Byrd Farm, ChiknEGG Cook ‘N Nook, delli Carpini Farm, Elim Springs Farm, Forrest Green Farm, Reynolds Community College Gardens, Keenbell Farm, Lickinghole Creek Craft Brewery, Renew Richmond Community Farm, Shalom Farms, Tricycle Gardens, Twin Oaks Community Garden, Victory Farms, Virginia Vegetable Company, Waverly Farm
Read More About the Farms Here
Photo Wren Vile
And if you can’t make it then, maybe you have enough interest in buckwheat and other technical gardening details to join the VABF-VSU Buckwheat Trials Field Tour at Twin Oaks:
Twin Oaks Garden Tour: Oct 7, 2015, 4pm – 6pm
Buckwheat trials are now underway on four Virginia farms. A field tour at Old Crowe Farm in Red Oak happened on August 22. Now it’s the turn of Twin Oaks. The buckwheat trial plots are unlikely to still have buckwheat. Instead you can see the next stage of our experiment – a version of Carol Deppe’s Eat-All Greens. I reviewed her lovely book, The Tao of Vegetable Gardening here. Carol lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she broadcasts small patches of various carefull;y selected crops to cut at an adolescent stage and use for salads or cooking greens. Here in the mid-Atlantic, we are experimenting with fall sowing of rows of various crops that she recommends, and a few others to see what happens.
We can also talk about about cover crops, year-round vegetable production and fall season crops.
Twin Oaks Community, 138 Twin Oaks Road, Louisa, VA 23093
Methane and Climate Change.
I received a comment on my review of Laura Lengnick’s book Resilient Agriculture. I’ve given Randall Snyder’s comment more thought and replied to him. Here is some information I found while reading Ben Hartman’s Lean Farm (review coming soon, I promise!)
Is animal farming the chief cause of climate change? Not according to what I’ve read. A UN report (FAO Livestock’s Long Shadow, 2006) says that cattle-rearing generates 18% of greenhouse gas emissions measured as the CO2 equivalent. 37% of all human-induced methane (which is 23 x as warming as CO2) is largely produced by the digestive systems of ruminants. So, clearly livestock farming makes a big contribution to climate change. But the high level of pollution from cattle is because of intensive agriculture. Specifically, feeding grain to cattle rather than grazing them. In order to produce lots of meat cheaply, industrial farmers feed grain, which is not a natural part of the ruminants’ diet.The UN says we need to improve animal diets in order to reduce enteric fermentation and methane emissions. Cost-cutting by industrial farming has simply passed even larger costs to all of humanity.
We need to eat. Some people like to eat meat. There are parts of the world where farming with grazing animals makes best use of the land. For example, slopes and highly erodeable soils are best kept under sod, rather than plowed up for crop farming. On many farms some combination of vegetable, grain, tree crop and meat farming makes sense, and indeed the diversity can be a strategy for dealing with a changeable and unpredictable climate, as Laura Lengnick points out in Resilient Agriculture. Ducks, chickens and pigs can eat food scraps and vegetable crop residues, and contribute manure.
Reducing food waste is an important step to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. Organic matter (including food) in landfills accounts for 16% of US methane emissions (Dana Gunders, “Wasted: How America is Losing up to 40% of its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill.” Natural Resources Defense Council, August 2012.)
And I’ll leave you with this fun, surprising, interactive website from the LA Times on the Food-Water-Footprint, where you can see how much water is used to produce the plate of food you choose. Inevitably the choices are limited, and the foods are all “Commercial US Average” (let’s hope we’re doing better!), but the information from the relative values is useful.
Photo LA Times
